“Why not stop on by and pay me a visit?” wrote current ASUPS President Paige Maney in an email sent to Mitchell Leatherman on Jan. 28.
This email was sent to all students currently enrolled at the University of Puget Sound. School officials reported that this message was aimed at all students, encouraging them to get involved. Mitchell Leatherman disagreed.
“I was blatantly catfished by Paige Maney,” Leatherman said.
Leatherman had been cataloguing Maney’s emails since the beginning of the 2014 fall semester at Puget Sound.
“Happy Fourth Week of Class, Student Body!” wrote Maney on Sept. 19, 2014.
“This is where it all starts, you see,” Leatherman said, dissecting Maney’s verbiage. “I felt it was very forward of her. Frankly, I felt a little objectified. Yes, I’m a student, and yes, I have a body, but that’s not all I am.”
Leatherman said the second email, sent less than a month later, was when he began to put the pieces together.
“Hello hello,” began the email sent from Maney on Oct. 9, 2014.
“‘Well, that was awfully flirty,’ I thought to myself,” Leatherman said. “Two hellos in a row? Buy me dinner first, am I right? The whole thing was wrought with phrases like ‘get a feeling’ and ‘please check out’ and ‘stop on by.’ I saw her in a whole new light. She saw something, or rather, someone, she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to romantically encode it in her emails.”
Campus officials claimed the whole thing was a vast misunderstanding.
“Honestly I don’t understand how someone could interpret these emails as personal. Everything Paige writes is very much directed at the entire student body as a whole. That kid must be some kind of raging narcissist,” remarked one official, who wished to remain anonymous.
Leatherman responded to the official’s comment by saying, “It was never about me. It was about Paige. Well, and me. It was about us. Paige and I put the ‘us’ in ASUPS.”
A counseling professional from the Counseling, Health and Wellness Services (CHWS) was unavailable to comment on the thought processes influencing Leatherman’s reading of the emails. However, a part-time student employee at the CHWS front desk paused her game of Trivia Crack to speculate about the situation.
“Oh, yeah, I get those emails from the ASUPS president, too, but I mostly ignore them,” the sophomore Classics major said. “Like, yeah, it’s kind of weird that he thought they were like just written for him or whatever. But like, I also get it. When you like someone, you sometimes see things that aren’t there to validate this, like, false reality that ends up in your favor.”
Jan. 28 was the day Mitchell Leatherman decided to take his perceived online relationship with Maney into the real world.
“In her email that day, she referred to this semester as ‘our semester.’ And then, there it was. Plain and simple, a call to action, she asked, ‘Why not stop on by and pay me a visit?’” Leatherman reported, “She closed the email by saying ‘Take a crazy chance on 2015.’ So I did.”
Leatherman showed up to Maney’s office with an axe that evening, and was promptly escorted out of the building by security.
“I just thought the axe would be a cute gesture. She was always calling me ‘Logger’ in the emails,” Leatherman said. “In retrospect, I understand how the axe could be misconstrued. The point is, she wasn’t there to defend me when security was taking me away. And in that moment it occurred to me that I, Mitchell Leatherman, was catfished by ASUPS president Paige Maney.”
When asked to comment on her relationship with Mitchell Leatherman, Maney responded, “Who?”
